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Monday, February 14, 2011

Hello again to my faithful followers. Making money online just got more difficult!

I've obviously been slaving away too long with my nose to the grindstone and didn't realize that times were a-changin'. No sooner did I post about my dilemma over what SEO strategy to use than I look up and find that all the rules are changing.

Griz (the acknowledged guru of IM) has decided that building a brand and focusing on becoming an authority is the proper way of gaining trust (and therefore, traffic) from Google and the other SEs. And he's not the only one. It seems all of the 'big guys' are changing their tune from massive link building to building a real company and marketing online just as any brick-and-mortar company would do. Then let the links come as they may and the cream will rise to the top.

Easy for them to say. These 'gurus', whether they like the term or not, sit atop their perch and change the rules. In all honesty, maybe its G that is changing the rules and they are just changing strategies to maintain their perch (and the lifestyles on which they have become accustomed).

If you happen to not be the cream, what then? If you are not an expert or an authority, should you just give up?

This is my new dilemma. It sounds to me like they are telling me to pack it up and call it a day. Because I am not an authority on anything that someone else can't already beat me at. Sure I have my perspective on things, but can I write daily, weekly, or more on a given topic an build a site that has more clout than real experts.

Sigh.

Maybe the SEs are getting smarter and will learn how to discern the difference between artificially created backlinks and naturally created backlinks, but until I earn an expert status in something, I think the old-fashioned way will still work best for most folks.

Once I am able to earn a living online and quit my day job, I'll consider myself an expert on making money online.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

As I sit here, I'm staying home from work due to yet another snow storm. At lest that gives me time to write about how to make money from home. This is a topic that I am endlessly interested in since I am hoping not just to make extra money, but to completely earn a living from it.

If you've read any of my other posts, you may know that I'm a Griz follower. In my opinion, he's the master of MMO. Very basically, his strategy is to write long rambling posts that would naturally accumulate all manner of long tail keywords by the search engines (SEs), most notably Google. He advocates posts that reach into the thousands of words. Loooong.

The second part of his method is to get the best backlinks using proper anchor text that you can get. If you can't get good backlinks (meaning high Page Rank and from your niche), then focus on getting as many other backlinks as possible. Always with good anchor text.

This is also the method taught at The Keyword Academy. I'm a member and I encourage anyone that wants to make money blogging or any other online venture to join as well. They're good people.

In fact, there is a competing theory over there that indicates you should strictly focus on writing content for your own site. But the trick is to write about extremely long tail keywords with almost no competition. You will thus rank very quickly for these obscure keywords.

I'm thinking of experimenting with this second theory as I'm not a prolific writer and writing such long posts does not appeal to me AT ALL.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Greetings to new readers who have managed to find my tiny site. As I learn new ways to earn online money, I'll pass them on to you. In the meantime, I'm posting my earnings so you can track my progress and see how I'm doing.

I encourage you to compare yourself to my progress. Some of you will blow me out of the water, others will be able to relate to my struggles.

Here's the recent history...

09/10: $7.48
10/10: $18.99
11/10: $26.58
12/10: $54.33

And January came in at a disappointing $50.50. Going the wrong direction, but February looks promising so far...

As of Janurary 31, I had around 78,000 incoming links from various sources. I continue to struggle over the best strategy to make money online. More on that later.

As I have time, I'll update some more about current SEO strategies and best practices for making money online.